8 steps to becoming a UC expert

Step 5: Become a firewall expert

“The biggest problem is firewalls,” eVideo’s Morgan says. Firewall traversal is essential to most unified communications installations.

It allows employees to communicate with others outside the intranet without opening up the general network to outsiders.

Morgan says even though he sends out pre-install documentation to IT managers, his team still needs to do a lot of handholding when it comes to which ports to open and how many. “Internal IT managers don’t know that you have a certain amount of ports in each location. Video conferencing is not into latency and jitter; it’s got to be the same speed going up and back.

“There is a lot of consultancy we have to do in video conferencing, even with customers that have had standard definition video and we’re replacing it with high definition. Going from ISDN to broadband is not as simple as everyone thinks – that you just plug it in.”

This is where certifications are worth their money – properly certified engineers know the difference between network integration for video conferencing compared to PCs. “Our team is in constant training mode. The challenges with what we do is that a lot of our staff are in training all the time,” Morgan says.

Step 6: Pick your target market

It is worth taking unified communications to one niche first and get used to doing it there before doing it in other niches. “You need to look at your level of engagement and where you’re going to start, how it fits in with your market verticals and make sure it matches your business,” Avnet’s Friend says.

Make sure you’re not overselling a solution to a customer who can’t afford it – or won’t be able to take full advantage of the technology. Pieter deGunst from Tecala, a UC integrator, says he doesn’t see much point in selling UC to a single-site office of 10 people.

Instant messaging and voice and video collaboration in that situation would be overkill unless the staff are using it to communicate with customers, says deGunst. “Our [UC] customers have multiple sites, travelling remote workers, overseas offices, executives on the road . . .”

The early sales pitch for voice over IP telephony – saving on call costs – doesn’t stack up in the SMB sector “unless they have expensive telephony costs”, deGunst says.

“Typically when you’re looking at a UC system it’s not there to save money. A lot of vendors have gone out there and tried to do an ROI or TCO on that alone and caused a lot of damage.”